Mieczysław Weinberg The Passenger (German: Die Passagierin) opera to libretto by Alexander Medvedev after a novel of the same name published in 1962 by concentration camp survivor Zofia Posmysz. Directed 2021 by Nadja Loschky at Oper Graz, Austria. Stars Dshamilja Kaiser (Lisa), Will Hartmann (Walter), Nadja Stefanoff (Marta), and Markus Butter (Tadeusz). Roland Klutting conducts the Grazer Philharmoniker and the Chor der Oper Graz (Chorus Master Bernhard Schneider). Set design by Etienne Pluss; costume design by Irina Spreckelmeyer; lighting design by Sebastian Alphons; dramaturgy by Marlene Hahn and Yvonne Gebauer; video by Christian Weißenberger. Directed for TV by Alex Stummer. Sung in German, Polish, French, Czech, Yiddish, Russian, and English. Released 2022, disc has 5.1 Dolby Digital sound. Grade: NA
The trailer below is not impressive when compared to the David Pountney production at the Bregenz Festival in 2010. Pountney followed the opera set written into the libretto by Weinberg with an upper half showing a luxury steamship and the lower half showing the prisoner barracks at Auschwitz just as they appear in the newsreels from 1945. This makes it relatively simple to tell Weinberg’s story. According to Joe Cadagin writing in the February 2023 Opera News (pages 50-51) director Laschky at Gratz “lets the past and present intermingle in a surrealist dream space crowded with closets and cupboards doors.” This makes it harder to tell the story. David Fanning reviewed the 2021 Oper Graz video at page 103 of the October 2022 Gramophone. Fanning warns that “the Graz semi-abstract setting is too neat to convey the horror of Auschwitz yet too stark to suggest a luxury steamship.” So it would appear that the Bregenz Festival production is still the one to get.
We just checked. Our now elderly Blu-ray disc with the Bregenz production (from the now extinct Neo label) still plays well. We would expect the reprint later from Arthaus to also play nice.
Here’s a trailer from Naxos:
OR
